MU receives direct connection to Internet2

As most Internet historians know, the Web began as a research and collaborative tool for universities.

Filling that void now is Internet2 — a secured network utilized by leaders in higher education, industry and government.

Internet2’s advantage over the public Web network is its security, quickness in data transfer and research collaboration possibilities; it’s directly connected to more than 200 American universities, as well as 60 leading research corporations and 70 government agencies, according to the Internet2 Network’s Web site.

For years, the University of Missouri used Internet2 through an off-campus provider. Today Gary Allen, MU’s chief information officer, will announce that the university has directly connected to the Internet2 Network.

Developed in the late 1990s, Internet2 is not only an educational data research resevoir. The Internet2 community develops and tests cutting edge Internet technologies, which might one day be used on the the public Internet.

In 2006, the platform went from 10 to 100 GE technologies, which is 100 times faster than Google Fiber, an Internet2 news release said.

Gary Allen, MU’s chief information officer, said in a statement that Internet 2’s speed is a “game-changer.”

“With this new cyber-infrastructure, researchers will experience less delay than they do opening a file on a local disk drive or physical storage medium — something unimaginable until recently,” Allen said.

Allen is scheduled to make the announcement at 10 a.m. in the Bond Life Sciences Center’s Monsanto Auditorium during Cyberinfrastructure Day.

The day of events and lectures is open to faculty researchers, graduate students and research support staff who use computing technologies in research.